The Golden Calf - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (best books to read ever TXT) 📗

with delicate circumlocution, that her husband was suffering from an imprudent use of stimulants for some time past.

'That is what I feared,' said Ida; but it is too dreadful. It is the very last thing I expected. I thought nobody drank nowadays.'

'Very few people get drunk, my dear Mrs. Wendover,' replied the doctor; 'but, unhappily, though there is very little drunkenness, there is a great deal of what is called "pegging"--an intermittent kind of tippling which goes on all day long, beginning very early and ending very late. A man, whose occupation in life is headwork, begins to think he wants a stimulant--begins by having his brandy and soda at twelve o'clock perhaps; then finds he can't get on without it after eleven; then takes it before breakfast--in lieu of breakfast; and goes on with brandy and soda at intervals till dinner-time. At dinner he has no appetite, tries to create one with a bottle of dry champagne, eats very little, but dines on the champagne, feels an unaccountable depression of spirits later on in the evening, and takes more brandy, without soda this time; and so on, and so on; till, after a period of sleeplessness, he begins to have ugly dreams, then to see waking visions, hear imaginary voices, stumble upon the edge of an imaginary precipice. If he is an elderly man he gets shaky in the lower limbs, then his hands become habitually tremulous, especially in the early morning, when he is like a figure hung on wires--and so on, and so on; and unless he pulls himself up by a great moral effort, the chances are that he will have a sharp attack of _delirium tremens_.'

'You do not fear such an attack for my husband?

'Mr. Wendover is a young man, but he has evidently abused his constitution; there is no knowing what may happen if you don't take care of him. Alcohol is a cumulative poison, and that "pegging" I have told you of is diabolical. Nature throws off an over-dose of alcohol, but the daily, hourly dose eats into the system.'

'How am I to take care of him?' asked Ida, despairingly.

'You must keep wine and spirits away from him, except in extreme moderation.'

'What! speak to the butler? Tell him that my husband is a drunkard?'

'You need not go quite so far as that, but it will be necessary to cut off the supplies somehow, and to substitute a nourishing diet for stimulants.'

'Yes, if he could eat: but he has no appetite--he eats hardly anything.'

'Unhappily, that is one of the symptoms of his disease, and the most difficult to overcome. But you must do your utmost to make him eat, and to prevent his getting brandy. A little light claret or Rhine wine may be allowed; nothing more. I will send you a sedative which you can give him at bedtime.'

'I do not think he will take anything of that kind. He has set his face against accepting your advice.'

'I believe if you were to take a decided tone, he would succumb; if not, you had better ask Dr. Mallison to come down and see him. It will be a costly visit, and money thrown away, as the case is perfectly simple; but I dare say you will not mind that.'

'I should mind nothing if he could be cured. It is horrible to see such ruin of body and mind in one so young,' Ida answered sadly.

'Well, you must see what influence you can exercise over him for his own good. I will call every other day, and hear how you are getting on with him; and if you fail, we must summon Dr. Mallison.'

Ida spoke to the butler. It was a hard thing to do, and it seemed to her a kind of treachery against her husband--as if she were inflicting everlasting disgrace upon him in secret, like a midnight assassin, who stabs his victim in the back. Her voice trembled, and her face was deadly pale as she spoke to the butler, an old servant who had been in the household from his boyhood.

'Rogers, I want you to be a little more careful in your arrangements about wine and spirits,' she began, falteringly. 'Mr. Wendover is in a low state of health--suffering from a nervous complaint, in fact; and we fear that he is taking too much brandy. Will you kindly try to prevent it?'

'It will be very difficult, ma'am. Mr. Wendover gives his orders, and he expects to be obeyed.'

'But upon this one point you must not obey him. You can say that you have Lady Palliser's orders that no more brandy is to be brought up from the cellar. I shall tell her that I have told you this.'

'Yes, ma'am. I was afraid too much brandy was being drunk, but it was not my place to mention it,' said Rogers, politely.

He would have said the same, perhaps, had the house been on fire.

Neither sherry nor champagne was served at dinner that day, and the claret which was offered Mr. Wendover was of a very thin quality.

'I'll take champagne,' he said to the butler.

'There is not any upstairs, sir.'

Brian turned angrily upon the man, and Ida, pale but resolute, came to the rescue.

'We do not drink champagne at dinner when we are alone, Brian,' she said; 'and I don't think it is quite fair to Vernie's cellars that Moët should be served every day because you are here.

'Vernon's cellars! Ah, I forgot that we are all here on sufferance, and, that I am drinking Vernon's wine.'

'You may have as much of my champagne as you like,' said Vernie, getting very red; 'but I don't think it does you any good, for you are always so cross afterwards.'

Brian looked at the boy with a savage gleam in his eyes, and muttered something, but made no audible reply.

'I'll go back to my chambers to-morrow,' he said: 'I can have a bottle of Moët there without being under an obligation to anybody. Give me some brandy and soda,' he said to the butler; 'I can't drink this verjuice.'

'There is no brandy, sir.'

'Oh! Sir Vernon's cognac is to be kept sacred, too. I congratulate you, Vernon, upon having two such economical guardians. Your minority will be a period of considerable saving.'

He made no further remonstrance, drank neither claret nor hock, ate hardly anything, but sat through the dinner in sullen silence, and went off to his room directly Lady Palliser had said grace, leaving the others to take their strawberries and cream alone. Vernon was what Kogers the butler called 'a mark on' strawberries and cream.

When Vernie had finished his strawberries, Ida went to her husband's study; but the door was locked, and when she asked to be admitted Brian refused.

'I'd rather be alone, thank you,' he answered, curtly. 'I have an article to write for one of the legal papers. You can amuse yourself with the baronet. I know you are always glad to be free.'

'Come for a stroll in the park, Brian,' she pleaded gently, pitying him with all her heart, more tenderly inclined to him in his decay and degradation than she had been in his prime of manhood, before these fatal habits began. 'Do come with us, dear. We won't walk further than you like; it's a lovely evening.'

'I hate a summer twilight,' returned Brian; 'it always gives me the horrors--a creepy time, when all sorts of loathsome creatures are abroad--bats, and owls, and stag-beetles, cockchafers, and other abominations. Can't you let me alone?' he went on, angrily. 'I tell you I have work to do.'

Ida left him upon this, without a word. What was she to do? This was her first experience of a mind diseased, and it seemed to her worse than any trouble that had ever touched her before. She had stood beside her father's death-bed, and the hair of her flesh had stood up at the awful moment of dissolution, when it was as if verily a spirit had passed before her face, calling her beloved from the known to the unknown. Yet in the awe and horror of death there had been holiness and comfort, a whisper of hope leading her thoughts to higher regions, a promise that this pitiful, inexplicable parting was not the end. This dissolution in the living man, this palpable progress of degradation, visible day by day and hour by hour, was worse than death. It meant the decay and min of a mind, the wreck of an immortal soul. What place could there be in heaven for the drunkard, who had dribbled away his reason, his power to discriminate between right and wrong, by perpetual doses of brandy? what could be pleaded in extenuation of this gradual and deliberate suicide?

Ida went slowly downstairs, her soul steeped in gloom, seeing no ray of light on the horizon; for with the most earnest desire to save her erring husband, she felt herself powerless to help him against himself. If he were denied the things he cared for at Wimperfield, there was little doubt that he would go back to his solitary chambers, where he was his own master. He was not so ill either in mind or body as to justify her in using actual restraint.

At the moment she thought of telegraphing for Aunt Betsy, whose firm manly mind might offer valuable aid in such a crisis: but she shrank from the idea of exposing her husband's degradation even to his aunt. She did not want the family at Kingthorpe to know how low he had fallen. Mr. and Mrs. Jardine had been impressed by the change in him, and Bessie had harped upon his lost good looks, habitual irritability, and deteriorated manners; but neither had hinted at an inkling of the cause; and Ida hoped the hideous truth had been unsuspected by either. She decided, therefore, during those few minutes of meditation which she spent in the portico waiting for Vernon, that she would rely on her own intelligence, and upon professional aid rather than upon any family intervention. If she could, by her own strong hand, with the help of the London physician, lead her husband's footsteps out of this Tophet into which he had sunk himself, she would spare no trouble, withhold no sacrifice, to effect his rescue, and she and her stepmother, the kindliest of women, would keep the secret between them.

Vernon came bounding out of the hall, eager for the accustomed evening ramble. This evening walk with the boy had been Ida's happiest time of late, perhaps the only portion of her day in which she had enjoyed the sense of freedom from ever present anxiety, in which she had put away troubled thought. She had gone back to her duty meekly and resignedly when this time of respite was over, but with a sense of unspeakable woe. Wimperfield with its lighted windows, stone walls, and classic portico, had seemed to her only as a prison-house, a whited sepulchre, fair without and loathsome within.

Vernie was full of curiosity about that little scene at the dinner table. The boy had that quick perception of the minds and acts of others which is generally developed in a child who spends the greater part of his life with grown-up people; and he had been quite as conscious as his elders of the unpleasantness of the scene.

'I hope Brian doesn't think I'm stingy about the wine,' he said; 'he might drink it all for anything I should care. I